Spider World #3 – The Fortress by Colin Wilson

Posted on February 14, 2025 by schoultz

Why this book I’ve been a Colin Wilson fan for 50 years and decided to read his Spider World Sci Fi series.  This is book 3. 

Summary in 3 Sentences: Niall is able to hide from the Death Spiders and in the process reconnects with Jim Doggins, another human who is well ensconced in the Spider World.  Doggins believes he that there is a hidden cache of explosives and powerful weapons that were  left behind by the previous humans in a closed off ancient building called The Fortress.  He and Niall collaborate to find with what little evidence they had,  those hidden explosives and powerful weapons   When they find and demonstrate the power of these weapons, the balance of power between Niall and his team of remaining humans, and the Death Spiders shifts and it appears that a battle for dominance and freedom will ensue. 

My Impressions:  The Fortress follows immediately upon The Tower. Niall is outside the tower and realizes that he must not be seen, as punishment for being out alone at night is severe.  He has a sense of mission, to get out from under the yoke of the Death Spiders,  but knows that they are out to get him.  So where to hide – he decides that he would be most inconspicuous hiding among the other human “servants’ who do the work for the Death Spiders.

With some difficulty, Niall  is able to make it to the part of the city where the human servants work and inconspicuously joins a work party going to another area where he runs into and reconnects with Jim Doggins – a human who has a key leadership position and credibility working for the Beetles, another powerful insect group that has a mutual non-aggression treaty with the Death Spiders.  Doggins has been in this world for quite some time and knows the rules, risks, who has what power, and it seems has created a pretty lucrative life for himself working for the Beetles, protected from the Death Spiders.  But Niall learns that indeed, he is a closet revolutionary. 

Niall decides to trust Doggins and realizes that Doggins shares his desire to free the humans from domination by the Spiders and/or the Beetles. When Doggins realizes that Niall has a map of the Spider City provided him by the Steegmaster, he realizes that this map could be the key to finding “the fortress” where the earlier humans had stored their very powerful weapons – weopons that could help free them from domination by the Death Spiders.  Without permission from his masters the Beetles, Doggins leads Niall and a group of human “servant” laborers to what the map identifies as “the fortress” and after a series of close calls and a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning, they are able to locate and achieve access to the armory of the earlier humans, which includes weapons beyond the capacity of the Death Spiders to defend against. (weapons that soldiers only dream about today – lazar like hand-held weapons, with adjustable levels of intensity, from surgical to being able to destroy a city block.)

When the Death Spiders find and confront Niall, Doggins and their small team, and tell them that they have violated many of the rules of Spider World,  Niall responds that they are not accepting their rules, and insists that they be allowed to leave, and that it is his intent to free humans from their exploitation.  He does not want to kill all the Death Spiders,  but makes what he intends to be a relatively harmless show of force, demonstrating the power of these weapons. He is still unfamiliar with the weapon and inadvertently uses a high power that kills multitudes of spiders.  This is seen by the Spiders as an unforgivable act for a human and brings this explosive situation to a head. The Death Spiders all quickly leave and  Niall, Doggins and their small team head back to Beetle world.   The Master Death Spider is there waiting for them. 

This situation ultimately forces a confrontation between the Death Spiders and the Beetles who the Master Death Spider accuses of treachery, being accomplices in Niall’s empowerment and his killing of the spiders.  The Master Death Spider demands that the Beetles turn over Niall to them or he will nullify their non-aggression treaty, which will mean war. 

The Beetle leader refuses, but insists that Niall and Doggins must either leave or give over their weapons and submit to the Beetles to help avert war.  The book concludes with Niall and Doggins choosing to leave Beetle world (and obviously Spider World) to go to the Delta where they might find a clue as to what next.  They also want to avoid the prospect of war between Beetles and the  Death Spiders, and an unknown role for Niall and Doggins and their small team of humans – who, though a small group, still have devastatingly powerful weapons.  

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Spider World #2 – The Tower, by Colin Wilson

Posted on February 13, 2025 by schoultz

Why this book:   I’ve been a Colin Wilson fan for 50 years and decided to read his Spider World Sci Fi series.  This is book 2. 

Summary in 4 Sentences:  At the end of Book 1, Niall returns from food foraging to find his father dead and his mother, brother and sisters gone, all signs pointing to them having been taken as hostages by the spiders. So he follows their tracks and eventually is captured by the wolf spiders, a brave and efficient breed who work for the more intelligent and ruthless Death Spiders, and they are all delivered to the Death Spiders their masters.  Niall is then for the first time exposed to the civilization that the Death  Spiders have created and explores using his nascent telepathic powers to try to understand the humans that are working there, as well as their insect masters. At the end of the book, he meets King Kazan who has been co-opted by the Death Spiders to work for them, and Niall is faced with getting on board and submitting to the Death Spiders, or rebelling.

My Impressions: Book 1 was a prelude – to set the background for the rest of the series.  In Book two, the story really begins.  While the formidable wolf spiders are bringing Niall, his mother and brother to the city of the Death Spiders, they are met by other humans who also work for the Death spiders, to transport them in what seem like Viking long boats across a large body of water to the big city of the Death Siders. 

Upon arrival in the Death Spider city, Niall tries to sort out what kind of world he has entered, who are the players and what role will behis to play.   We learn about the impressive mental powers of the Death Spiders and Niall is delivered to his former friend King Kazan, who’d been captured long before and hsd submitted to the Death Spiders power and authoriry, and was now collaborating with them to save himself and his surviving family.  From King Kazan, Niall gets more insights into the nature of the Death Spiders and the world they run. King Kazan begins his process of bringing Niall into his arrangement of submission and acceptance. 

Niall’s mother, sister and brother were all under Kazan’s protection, and Niall reconnects with his love interests from his earlier visit to King Kazan’s kingdom. All of them are under King Kazans care and thereby gain many privileges and are protected from the Death Spiders.  But Niall  learns that the Death Spiders have a particular interest in him personally – as they see him as a unique threat to their world and power.  He discovers that a tool he’d picked up earlier while following the wolf spiders, near what appeared to be relic from the old civilization, seemed to have some special properties, which Niall doesn’t know or understand.

The book is titled The Tower because in the middle of the Death Spider’s city is a glowing white tower that has no apparent entrance and which the Death Spiders have tried wiwthout success to enter or destroy.   It is a mystery relic from when humans had controlled the land. Much of the rest of the Death Spider city consists of ruins of a former human city, occupied by those the Death Spiders control – many humans, as well as wolf spiders and others. The Death Spiders have a monopoly on power in thier kingsdom  through their formidable mental powers.  

But to Niall, the white tower is an intriguing  mystery – the Death Spiders don’t control or understand it.  This inspires Niall to sneak out one night and see if he can figure something out about it.     When he gets to the tower, when he pulls out the special tool  he has to see if it can help him enter, and notices that it is buzzing and suddenly he is inside the tower.  There he meets a hologram of a wise old man – calls himself the Steegmaster. The tower is a sort of time capsule, isolated from and uncorrupted by the Death Spiders, and it retains  technology and wisdom from when humans had occupied the earth. The Steegmaster enlightens Niall about the world he is in, how humans had evolved and why they’d left, and gives Niall some cryptic guidance before disappearing.  Then Niall then finds himself outside the tower, with some decisions to make. 

This sets up the next book – The Fortress. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Without Hesitation – the Odyssey of an American Warrior, by Gen Hugh Shelton

Posted on January 5, 2025 by schoultz

Why this book:  I was looking for a book to listen to in my car and on my bike rides and selected this one, because I had briefly worked with Gen Shelton, and the time line of his career overlapped with mine, but in a parallel universe. Though he wouldn’t remember me, I hosted him at the Naval War College in 1995 when he was SOCOM commander, and served in the Pentagon while he was the Chairman of the JCS.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  General Shelton reads this audio book himself, telling his own story in not only his own words, but his own voice – from growing up to joining the Army, hitting the highlights of his career in the Army all the way to becoming the top miliary officer in the country.  Highlights include his 2 tours in Vietnam, his role in Operations Urgent Fury, Haiti, and other contingencies. It concludes with his perspectives at the political-strategic level of military leadership, as USSOCOM commander and then the Chairmen of the JCS. 

My Impressions: Really enjoyed listening to Hugh Shelton tell his story and was impressed not only with him, but how he told his story. One interesting dimension of the book – it begins with him in the hospital after a fall while trimming trees after he retired, paralyzed from the neck down.  Throughout the book, he interupts his story with the next chapter in what happened to him and how he dealt with it in the hospital – and then he’d return to where he left off in the story of his life. He comes back and deals with his in detail at the conclusion of the book – after he has retired.

His is almost a classic, traditional American  Horatio Alger story – only in this case, the “riches” were in leadership and influence in America.  The”rags’ part was not poverty, but a simple rural life.  Hugh Shelton grew up in Speed, NC, a small town ((today’s population 65) in the mountains of North Carolina, west of Rocky Mount.   Living on a ranch his grandfatther had purchased and farmed, his family were farmers, his mother was a school teacher, and he grew up with farm chores and hunted rabbits and squirrels in his spare time.  He did well in High School and found his way to NC State, which in the 1950s, required two years of military ROTC training of all males – after which he signed on for 2 more years to get the scholarship money.  He finished college and married Carolyn, his high school sweetheart.  

At 6′ 5″ tall, Shelton was an impressive and strong athlete, and volunteered for the most demanding training for elite soldiers.  That included parachute and ranger schools, and he succeeded in becoming one of he elite  “airborne Rangers.”   He later volunteered for and passed rigorous Green Beret training and was sent to Vietnam as a Special Forces officer.

Recounting  his experiences in Vietnam as a Special Forces Officer is where we truly begin to see his courage, integrity, and commitment to the values-based leadership he had learned growing up and which was reinforced by the Army. He did two tours in Vietnam and his stories from that war are unforgettable.  

Much of the rest of the book is about the evolution of his Army career, how he kept getting selected for higher rank and increased responsibility – while also his wife  Carolyn supported him and raised their three sons. 

Repeatedly he did not get the assignments he requested, but took what he was given and excelled.  His reputation for discipline, hard work and outstanding leadership led eventually bto his assignment to some of the plum jobs in the US Army, commanding the 82nd Airborne Division, the XVII Airborne Corps, United States Special Operations Command and finally the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the nation.  His story includes interesting anecdotes and perspectives from each of these assignments.

Again, throughout the book his story is interrupted by brief chapters in the story of his path to recovery from his spinal chord injury.

His tour as Charman of the JCS – how he was selected and how he served primarily President Bill Clinton and SEDEF Cohen, was most fascinating to me. The terrorist attacks of  September 11 2001 happened just weeks before his term as Chairman concluded.  His account of that incident and how the Chairman responded was most interesting.  

Hugh Shelton doesn’t bad-mouth anyone, and gives praise and accolades to many.  I noted that he never mentioned West Point in the book, though in my experience, the “West Point Mafia” seems to run much of the Army.  He clearly enjoyed working for President Bill Clinton, had mixed feelings about President Bush, most notably because of his decision to invade Iraq, and he clearly didn’t care for working for Donald Rumsfeld after the 2000 election.  But throughout the book, he showed reverence for the values which underpin American Democracy and the foundational values of the US Army, of which he was a quintessential living example. 

The book concludes with the rest of his unlikely recovery (though not full) from his spinal chord injury – his soul-searching, treatment, and therapy  during his many months at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and then his activities after his release.  

Throughout the book, he repeatedly honors his wife Carolyn and in fact,  her voice is included in the audiobook’s introduction. He makes clear that she was a major player in his career and in all the key life decisions he made.  

Today, General Shelton serves as the Director of the Hugh and Carolyn Shelton Military Neurotrauma Foundation located in Washington, DC. while also supporting the  General Hugh Shelton Leadership Center at North Carolina State University in Raleigh which he helped to found. .

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Posted on January 2, 2025 by schoultz

Why this book:  Selected by my literature reading group.  This was my 3rd time reading it.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  A tale of five generations of a family in a village/small town in the remote jungles of Columbia in South America.  It is a novel made up of multiple short stories of some normal, many eccentric characters,  beginning with the founder of the fictional town of Macando and his multiple progeny over a century of change and human drama.  “Reality” is somewhat flexible concept here, as there are occurrences that don’t seem to fit the world most of  us live in – in fact this book is considered one of the sources of the genre of “magical realism.” 

My Impressions: This very famous book is a panorama of life in a small town anywhere, but with a number of specifics related to Latin America in the early and mid 20th century.   It is more a series of stories that provide a trajectory of life that it is a single story – it is multiple stories that happen within a single family over multiple generations, over a century in a small town in a remote part of the jungle in Colombia.  We get to know a number of eccentric and interesting characters and their experiences in  the narrow mindedness peculiar to small town’s every where.  And we see the slow, almost insidious disruption brought on by 20th century modernity creeping into the culture of an isolated small town culture.  

There are a multitude of stories and fascinating characters, representing so many different types of people we all encounter – from the ambitious to libertines, to the most practical, to the cruel, deluded, and insane.   The book is a compilation of a multitude of stories that together create the mosaic of a family that fragments over many generations, and a remote town that struggles with making the transition from the 19th to the 20th century

After reading the book, and now trying to write e a summary of it, I am somewhat at a loss in trying to describe it.  So I have read a summary of it on the site “Super Summaries” and again, I am still somewhat at a loss.  Here are a few random impressions.

  • The flow of events is not logical – nor even completely sequential.  Timelines bounce around a bit.  The capriciousness of the many characters in the story take the story of Macondo and the Buendia family in so many different and directions.  There is no step-by-step pathway to a happy ending. In fact there are no classic, feel good happy endings. 
  • The matriarch Ursula is a constant throughout the book, as the one character with her  feet-on-the-ground with practical wisdom in the Buendia family focused on making prudent decisions, while her husband and sons chase chimerical dreams and adventures.  Her daughter and daughters-in-law eventually supersede her and assume more authority as she ages and her influence wains, but as her simple practical wisdom and influence is ignored, the family and household begin to fall apart.  She eventually is considered irrelevant and old fashioned by her children, grand children and their families – much to their detriment. 
  • Remedios the Beauty and Fernanda del Carpio were the most beautiful women in the book – and men became almost helplessly intoxicated and obsessed with their beauty and erotic appeal.  But their characters were the least appealing – they were two of the most psychologically screwed up characters in the novel.  Marquez is perhaps making a statement about how men are blinded by the beauty of such women.
  • Col Aureliano Buendia was perhaps the strongest character in the book.  He is self contained, not driven by sexual passions or greed and unlike many of the Buendia men, is deliberate in his decisons.  Over and over again, he instigated and led a revolution for idealistic reasons, but the years of war made him cruel and unfeeling, and eventually detached from life and his family. In the end he isolated himself into his own world, somehow having survived the many attempts on his life.  But in spite of his cynicism and bitterness, he was publicly hailed as an icon of patriotism, courage and character. 
  • Modernity was both welcomed and resisted in Macondo – much of it brought by a gringo owned Banana company.  The “Modernity” that slowly crept into Macondo included trains, and electricity, mail and postal service, connections with the world beyond, not only in Colombia but also Europe the US and beyond.  and toward the end telephones.  These innovations disrupted the tradtional values and patterns of life within Macondo and made the older citizens feel even more disconnected from the momentum of Macondo’s progress and adaptation to modernity.
  • Sexuality and the power of the sexual drive is a constant theme in the book. The men in this story always had the outlet of the French bordello in Macondo, while they followed the  protocols of their social class with the women they were courting.  Several had mistresses as well as wives, and some of the women were as ardently sexual as the men.  The spiritual connection between the men and their wives was largely a function of their sexual connection – and where it wavered or fizzled,  the relationships began to  fracture.  
  • The House that Jose Arcadio Buendia built when he founded Macondo grew and evolved into becoming the home of the greater Buendia family and legacy. This was largely the result of Ursula’s efforts and as such she became the proponrent and caregiver of the Buendia family.  The home she built came to represent the family  as later generations used it for good and then abused it for unseemly purposes, over time letting it decay and fall into disrepair, as did the legacy of the Buendia family.
  • Melquiades is a mysterious figure who appears early in the novel with a troupe of Gypsies and befriends and intrigues Jose Arcado Buendia – the pater-familia who founded Macondo. Melquiades is interested in new scientific discoveries, and instills that fascination and passion for new possibilities into Jose Arcado Buendia.  He returns to Macondo ever few years, then decides to stay there and live in the family’s house  working on a manuscript in a coded language until he dies.  After his death, the room does not decay and never changes, and follow-on Buendias become obsessed with understanding his writings.  When they are finally deciphered, it is realized that the Melquiades had predicted the entire chain of events leading up to the point at which these writings are decode.    At which point, the town and all in it, were wiped off the face of the earth by a hurricane.  Which leaves me the reader to ask whether Marquez was telling us that all that had happened to Macondo and the Buendias had been predestined.
  • Magical Realism.  This book is often used as an early example of the literary genre  called “magical realism” – in that events and occurrences are described as normal and real that defy the reality that most of us live in.  In One Hundred Years of Solitude we regularly see strange occurrences, psychic insights and supernatural events described as unremarkable.  We see flying carpets, ghosts, the ascension of Remedios the Beauty into heaven, the longevity of Ursula, Jose Arcadio Buendia living in his own reality for years, tied to a tree outside the home, the reappearance of Melquiades and his prognostications, and other events that bespeak the paranormal, but which are considered a normal part of the strange reality that exists in Macondo.  These paranormal events add to the “magic” of the book in my opinion. 

The NETFLIX series.  As of this writing, I have watched part of the NETFLIX series and agree with several reviewers that it is a worthy representation of the book.  Watching the various scenes played out that I had read in the book added some clarity and brought the book to life for me in a way my imagination sometimes struggled with in reading it.  If fact, a number of incidents in the story whose significance I missed or  didn’t quite get my attention while reading the book, were presented in the series in a way that helped me better realize their significance and broader implications.    Watch the series and then read the book, or read the book and then watch the series – the two complement each other and go together like peantut butter and jelly. In my view, they are better together than either one alone.  

My recommendation:  Yes, read the book – it is considered a classic of 20th century literature, and (I believe) deserves the attention it’s gotten.  But it is not a quick, easy read.  It is sometimes not easy to follow, but the reader has to be willing to go along for the ride – and let him/herself be amazed and surprised by what comes next.  One Hundred Years of Solitude has been widely praised as a classic example of magical realism, and of telling a long and strange story where the strange is normal, but also even the eccentric characters represent people all of us  know in our lives.  I ask myself whether the Grateful Dead were thinking of this book and the story of the Buendia family, when they wrote the lyrics to Truckin’  “What a long Strange Trip it’s been.” 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Spider World #1 – The Desert, by Colin Wilson

Posted on December 21, 2024 by schoultz

Why this book:  I’ve been a fan of Colin Wilson since I was in college.  I’ve read many of his books, both fiction and non-fiction. He was very proud of this Spider World Sci Fi series and so I finally decided to dive in. This is the first book in the series. 

Summary in 4 Sentences:  The book (and I assume the series) takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which humans are living in small stone-age-like tribes, trying to survive in a world dominated by killer spiders.  Insects and animals of many types have evolved to become  very large and often a grave threat to humans.  We are introduced to a family unit struggling to survive in the desert, and the protagonist, a young boy who has an innate ability to tune into the minds of other creatures, which he learns to develop. The story concludes with him being alone after the spiders find his family, kill his father and apparently enslave his mother and sister. 

My impressions:  This short book (180 pages) introduces Colin Wilson’s Spider World series by introducing the reader to the post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been forced into an almost a stone-age existence, struggling to survive in a very hostile world – facing very capable predators like the Death Spiders.  

We get to know the members of one family unit. They have a series of adventures which introduce us to the hostile world they live in,  and we get to know that family and that world through the eyes of Niall a young boy, who I believe will be a key protagonist in the series.  He and his  small hunter-gatherer family unit have little understanding of their history or of the world beyond their burrow/hiding place. They are very preoccupied with finding enough food to eat and water to drink, while avoiding detection from the Death Spiders  who are in constant search for humans from the air in their balloons.  And the Death Spiders are not the only predators who would gladly feast on human flesh – they are just the most advanced, powerful and threatening.  There are other spiders and predators who also pose a significant threat to humans. 

We travel with Niall on a couple of foraging expeditions with his father, during which we see the challenges posed by predator insects and other threats that exist in that desert world. The final expedition in the book is a several day trek to reconnect with another larger group of humans which has a more highly organized social network with a well developed means of defending against the predator spiders, which allows them to live and even thrive as an organized community.  Niall wants to stay with this group but chooses to return to his family with his father.  The book concludes with Niall losing his family, and reason to be uncertain as to the fate of the other larger, better organized group. 

Niall is young, courageous, determined and possesses a mental skill at sensing/reading the environment and the minds of adversaries that I’m sure we’ll see bear fruit in the next books. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Astrophysics for people in a Hurry, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Posted on December 21, 2024 by schoultz

Why this book: I’ve always been interested in “the big picture” and I’ve been impressed when I”ve heard Neil deGrasse Tyson speak on podcasts.  This book is short and engaging.   

Summary in 3 Sentences: DeGrasse Tyson covers a lot of ground in this book, from the size and nature of the universe, to how we know what we know, how scientists measure time and distance, to the possibility of life on other planets.  He discusses the universe, our galaxy, within that universe and our solar system within that galaxy,  and where and how it fits into the “big picture.”  He also gives us fascinating background on the periodic table, quarks, and photons, and quantum theory and the ongoing effort by astrophysicists to understand dark energy, dark matter and other perplexing concepts that defy current understanding. 

My Impressions: I listened to rather than read this book – it was  beautifully read by the author.  What a great introduction to physics – and in particular how it applies to the study of not only the universe, but also of existence and ‘what is.”  DeGrasse Tyson touches on many topics that tie the laws of physics that define the physical world that we live in, to the effort by scientists to understand the size, scope and nature of the Universe itself. 

That is a daunting task, but he manages it beautifully in 200 short pages, or in about 3 1/2 hours on audible.  The easiest way to summarize the scope of the book is to give you a look at the table of contents:

Preface 
1.  The Greatest Story Ever Told  
2.  On Earth as in the Heavens
3. Let There Be Light
4. Between the Galaxies
5. Dark Matter
6. Dark Energy
7. The Cosmos on the Table
8. On Being Round
9. Invisible Light
10. Between the Planets
11. Exoplanet Earth
12. Reflections on the Cosmic Perspective
Acknowledgments
Index\

He begins with a fascinating look at the “big bang” theory and how astrophysicists believe the Universe actually began.    He goes over the history of humans trying to understand the heavens and then the evolution of Newton’s insight that the laws that govern physical bodies on earth apply universally.  Then a discussion of light, the speed of light, the illusion that “space” is empty, the mysteries that led to the assumption of “dark energy” and “dark matter” and how the “existence” of certain phenomena today can only be explained and understood theoretically, as effects of  “something” like dark matter and dark energy.   But dark matter and dark energy are themselves not understood, nor can astrophysicists today see, experience, or describe them. 

He also describes how new particles and forms of energy have been discovered such as photons, microwaves, positrons, neutrinos, bosons, hadrons, quarks, quasars,  and more – foundations of the physical world that have only in the last century been discovered and are still being understood.  He introduces us to the tension between the general theory of relativity and quantum gravity,  and how efforts to deconflict and unify these two have been on-going  for nearly a century.   

There is a lot of content in this book, but it is summarized and simplified so that someone like me, with only a HS understanding of physics can begin to comprehend. I will listen to this book again and certainly gain more the second time. 

I have described this book as a  good left-brain balance to much of the strange metaphysics that I have been reading about and listening to, regarding unexplained and unexplainable paranormal phenomena which seem to violate our understanding of the space-time continuum and the physical laws described in this book.  

In particular, I really appreciated and savored his final chapter on what all this might mean to us in our view of ourselves in the universe, and our daily lives.  He calls it the “Cosmic Perspective” – a wise and well informed view of our small place in the vast Universe.

Highly recommended.   

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

Posted on December 17, 2024 by schoultz

Why This Book: I liked Deacon King Kong and had heard and read good things about this book

Summary in 3 Sentences: The novel takes place in the 1930s in a suburb of Pottstown, Pa, where Jews and Blacks lived apart from the main stream white culture.  Through the lives of several colorful figures in the Jewish and African American communities, we get to  know how life was constricted by prejudice and racist policies in America at that time.  Drama occurs when a prominent member of the community assaults a very popular Jewish lady who was harboring a black boy to prevent him from being unjustly institutionalized, and how the Black and Jewish communities came together to rectify this injustice. 

My Impressions  Enjoyed this book – and learned a lot, though I didn’t care for how he ended it – more on that later.   As he did in Deacon King Kong, McBride has a  meandering approach to describing the world of a poor under-privileged neighborhood in a different time and place.  We get to know the people who live in that world, and thereby come to understand and appreciate their lives, challenges and in some cases, heroism in dealing with their circumstances.   

The setting is a mixed Jewish and Black neighborhood in 1930s Pottstown, Pa. The story initially begins with the protagonist Moshe Ludlow, a rather dour Jewish theater manager marrying  and starting a life with the  crippled but otherwise beautiful, intelligent and congenial Chona, the Jewish daughter of the owner of the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.  Chona is well loved within both the Jewish and Black communities. In spite of institutional prejudice and racism, Moshe does pretty well making a living as a theater manager in Pottstown but is very careful to stay within his limitations as a Jew in Pottstown.  We also get to know characters in the adjacent poor black community and how the blacks and Jew struggle to take care of each other and survive in a world with systemic prejudices and discrimination against both groups.  

Ultimately these two communities – Jewish and African American living in a section of Pottstown known as “Chicken Hill”  – support each other against the predominant WASP culture that runs suburban Pottstown, though not without sharing many of the same prejudices against each other that the whites have against each of them.  The book is populated by a goodly number of memorable and colorful characters from both Jewish and Black communities, and a few bad-apple characters representing the oppressive WASP culture of Pottstown.

I chose to listen to the book because I enjoyed the narrator  Dominic Hoffman’s vocal rendition of Deacon King Kong,.  Again in Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Hoffman’s credible renditions of the accents and voices of the Black and Jewish and other characters in the book helped bring the time, and context of the story to life.  

The plot to this story is difficult to describe, as it meanders a bit – and  seems merely to serve as a venue for describing and developing the many colorful characters in this book, and for describing the culture of  Chicken Hill.   Moshe and Chona are key characters in the book but disappear for much of it as we get to know the many other interesting characters living on Chicken Hill.

Nate Timblin is Moshe’s lead employee and foreman for his theater and is a well respected black man on Chicken Hill.  Nate has a nephew who he wants to hide from authorities who intend to institutionalize him because they believe he is retarded – though in fact he is quite intelligent, but deaf.   Chona agrees to hide the boy, but he is eventually discovered and sent to the sanatorium reserved for the indigent – well known for poor conditions and abusing its patients.  They hatch a convoluted plot to rescue him from the institution, which takes up much of the latter part of the book – but again, it seemed primarily to offer a context for the author to further develop the fascinating characters in this community.  

The ending is satisfying but leaves a few strings untied.  What I didn’t care for was how as the book concludes, McBride felt compelled to give the reader a lecture that could have come out of a Marxist textbook. on how the capitalist system is rigged to permit the exploitation of the poor and the working class by the white wealthy classes.  That exploitation was evident and easily deduced from the story, as part of the reality of early 20th century America, but I didn’t need for him to preach it to me as The Truth. 

That said, I did enjoy the book – and indeed got many insights into Jewish-American culture and how Jews and Blacks lived in small town America a hundred years ago.   I was fully engaged in listening to the stories and the voices of the many memorable characters of Chicken Hill, and the descriptions of life in a semi-ghetto of Blacks and Jews outside of Pottstown Pa in the 1930s.  

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin

Posted on November 12, 2024 by schoultz

Why this book: I suggested it to my Sci Fi reading group based on having used Le Guin’s award-winning short story “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” in ethics classes when I taught at the Naval Academy.  I’d heard and read much about her, but none of her novels. This is reputed to be one of her best.

 Summary in 5 Sentences: Genly Ai is an earthly human  envoy sent from Ekumen, a  consortium of inhabited planets across a number of galaxies, to meet with the inhabitants of the planet Gethen, which has human-like, sentient, conscious beings living in a climate/environment like earth in the highest latitudes – very cold and mountainous for most of the year.  The mission of the envoy/ambassador is to  make contact with the inhabitants of Gethen and  convince them to join the Ekumen consortium.  The envoy is received with suspicion and gets caught in an ongoing tension between two different societies on Gethen, and is put into prison with little hope of survival.  A Gethenian friend, also a political refugee, who believed in the envoy and the Ekumen mission, rescues him from prison, and together they escape by travelling for months across a barren inhospitable arctic landscape.  In the course of that long and perilous journey, the two become close friends, learn to appreciate each other’s differences, and we get to know each of them and their different cultures more profoundly   

My Impressions:  Fascinating book – not a quick read – hard to figure out at first, but worth sticking with it.  A  thoughtful reader will appreciate it – not a lot of action, but a lot of very interesting dimensions to this story about an earthling on another planet dealing with differnt beings and different cultures.  This book has won so many awards and has had so much impact, it is a classic of the Science Fiction genre.  

Le Guinn grew up in a home of anthropologists and she was very familiar with cross-cultural tensions and misunderstandings,  and cross-cultural bridge building was her specialty.  What makes The Left Hand of Darkness stand out is not lots of action or Sci-Fi technological wizardry, space ships, and battles.  She creates a human-like culture on an imaginary planet Gethen, many light years away from earth, that on the surface seems similar to ours, but as we get to know it, we learn that the differences are profound in ways that give us insights and force us to consider who we are.  

Gender and Sexuality

We learn early on in the book, that the main difference between Genly Ai, a human, and Gethenians is in the areas of gender and sexuality.  Genly as a human is a male and has the human orientation that people are born male or female, (though some today are challenging that concept) and most humans consider their gender to be a core part of who they are. That’s not the case with Gethenians.

Le Guinn challenges our concepts of gender by creating the ambi-sexual Gethenians, who are both male and female, and for most of the time,  are indeed genderless.  But they become male or female only when mating during estrus, and in that process can be either male or female, father or mother of a child they conceive, and they have no control over that. The next time they mate, they may be the other gender. 

When they are not in estrus, they are genderless and asexual, and have no sexual drive or hunger.  But when a Gethenian goes into estrus – every 26 days for 2-3 days (sound familiar ladies?) a Gethenian becomes in a random manner, either male or female and copulates as such.  During this period of estrus, a Gethenian is semi-crazy with sex – completely distracted by the drive to procreate,  and is given latitude to fulfill that natural drive, to fulfill that desire  during estrus, and then when it’s over, get back to work.   There are places dedicated for Gethenians in estrus to meet and fulfill that all-consuming drive.   The Gethenians saw Genly Ai as a pervert because as a human male, he had only one gender and was in mild estrus all the time.  

There is very little reference in the book to the idea of “romance” associated with sexuality that we are familiar with as humans.  Only in one case, we learn that Genly’s Gethenian mentor Estraven had a close emotional tie to one of his partners who was raising their children while Estraven was engaged in politics.  And apperently they had had a falling out.   

The Story

The story begins with us meeting the human envoy Genly Ai representing a multi-galaxy consortium of planets visiting the planet Gethen with the mission of convincing them to join the consortium of inhabited planets in the galaxy.  Genly is attending a political ceremony with his Gethenian host Estraven who becomes a key player in the book.  Estraven was the prime minister, and believed in and supported Genly’s mission of convincing the Gethenians to join the Ekumen consortium,  but his rivals convinced the king that Estraven had other motives and had him banished.

That left Genly with no sponsor, so he decides to visit a neighboring country to learn their ways and to see if his offer from the Ekumen may have more appeal.  But after a warm reception, those suspicious of his motives have him imprisoned in what is remarkably like a communist re-education camp. There he is drugged and constantly interrogated, and begins to lose his sense of identity – when Estraven succeeds at a daring rescue  from the prison. After which the two are “on the lamb.”

Genly’s visit to the neighboring country had exposed him and us to two very different Gethenian cultures – one ruled by authoritarian fear, the other by bureaucratic committees with a secret police in the back ground.  Though there is tension between these two societies on Gethen, there has been no war.  Le Guinn postulates that without the constant drum beat of male aggressiveness and will to violence and power, the possibility of war is greatly reduced. 

As the story unfolds, Genly Ai is sharing with us in a first-person narrative, his impressions of the Gethenian culture as he perceives it.  In the second half of the book, after Estraven rescues him from the horrors of his prison, their only real option to avoid recapture is to escape across a vast arctic wasteland in subzero temperatures.   Estraven has prepared well for this arduous journey of several months to reach a safe haven.  During this second half of the book, during their long trek over an arctic ice field, the chapters alternate between Genly Ai’s and Estraven’s first person perspectives, and we see how these two individuals – Genly Ai,  a human, and Estraven a neuter with both male and female characteristics, come to respect, work together, and even love (not in a physical way) each other, as they depend on each other to survive in their arduous trek over the arctic wasteland.

At one point Genly and Estraven are discussing the differences between men and women on earth, Estrahan asks if they are fundamentally different.  Genly responds that whether one is born man or woman determines almost everything – vocabulary, clothing, opporunities, roes in society – and he notes that it’s extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. (P253)

During that months-long trek through an arctic waste land, Le Guin details how they moved and survived in the most inhospitable conditions.  I have some experience moving and camping in very cold environments,  and Le Guin’s novel accurately portrayed many of the difficulties and processes required to move and survive in that extremely challenging environment. I read separately that she had done research on arctic explorers and used what she had learned from their writings to describe how Genly Ai and Estraven worked together and survived on their long trek in sub zero temperatures.  

The book concludes with some drama and surprises and ultimately with contact established between Ekumen and the planet of Gethen.  

Some other interestng aspects of the book that caught my attention:

  • As a human from earth, Genly had mastered telepathy – what he calls “mindspeak” and teaches it to Estraven. Once Estraven had mastered it, much of their conversation in their tent at night was through silent mindspeak.
  • There is a subculture on Gethen of beings (again, neither men nor women, but both) which has many similarities to an Indian or Buddhist culture, that specializes in foretelling the future.  Genly Ai paid for their service, but it was an eclectic group that was not in the least materialistic. The responses that were given to questions about the future were ambiguous, clearly modeled after the Greek Delphic Oracle.
  • At the end of their very difficult journey over the ice field, there was an emotional  letdown that I recognized after completing an exhausting, all consuming task. “We were tired.  There was no more joy in us.”

Some good quotes that I found interesting.

  • “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
  • “The Ekumen is not a government at all. It is an attempt to unify the mustical with the political, and as such is of course mostly a failure; but its failure has done more good for humanity so far than the success of its predecessors.” 
  • To go thru kemmer (estrus) without a partner is pretty hard on a Gethenian.  Suppression (of Kemmer) produced ont frustration, but something more ominous in the long run: passivity. 
  • Genly to Estrahan – “You’re isolated and undivided. Perhaps you are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism”:
  • “Light is the left hand of darkness,  and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.” p 252
  • And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how the  yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become too often , so foolish and vile a bigotry.  Where does it go wrong?”   p300

The interaction between Genly and Estraven, especially during their long trek over the arctic mountains and ice field was a key part of the book.   Genly as a human from a more technologically advanced society was insensitive to the androgynous, male-female dynamic on Gethen, and in fact came off a bit chauvinistic by today’s standards (again this was written in 1969).  Estraven was the moral hero of the book, with strong male and female qualities, selfless and wise, not as physically strong as Genly but physically strong enough, with great endurance and a more developed moral compass. . 

One of Le Guin’s primary themes in this book was to get the reader to imagine gender as mutable and not a core aspect of our being.  What would it be like for there to be no inherent gender, for anyone to be able to bear children, to not have gender specific roles in society, for all beings to have qualities of both men and women, and for both to have responsibility for bearing and raising children, as well as filling traditionally male professions.   Can we imagine a society in which “gender” is a temporary state, otherwise irrelevant?   These were revolutionary ideas in 1969 when she wrote the book, and some argue that The Left Hand of Darkness has significantly influenced our revolution in gender roles in Western Society.

There is also the theme/analogy of a more technologically advanced culture connecting with  less technically advanced, but in some ways, more intuitive and sensitive cultures.  We are all familiar with  the results of the Europeans colonizing less developed parts of the world in the 16th – 19th centuries on earth – and how technological power drowned or destroyed many more subtle qualities in the colonized countries.    Genly seemed to feel a bit superior to the primitives on Gethen and was insensitive to many aspects of Gethenian culture – until he’d been there a while and came to appreciate nuances he’d missed early on.  Though Ekumen’s and Genly’s goals seemed noble and non-exploitative,  the end of hte book begs the question: would they stay that way?  And what would the impact of opening up the channels of communication and influence from Ekumen’s consortium of planets to Gethen have on Gethenian cultures?  At the end of the book, we were already seeing the Gethenians fascinated with space ships, airplanes, and other technologies.  Where would all that lead? 

These are questions, issues that Le Guin leaves hanging, in her very provocative book.  

One aspect of the book that was awkward and for which Le Guin has been roundly criticized by feminists (male and femail)  was that she used the male pronoun for Gethenians – so it was easy to visualize the Gethenians as men.  “They” would have been awkward.  S/he would have worked better for me. But occasionally she reminded us that Estraven had female qualities and characterisitics, though reading the book, and having “him” referred to as “he” leads the reader to visualize and imagine Estraven as a male.  He was no more a male than a female. This is a shortcoming of this provocative book.  

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Midnight Library. by Matt Haig

Posted on November 8, 2024 by schoultz

Why this book: Really liked The Life Impossible, and had heard good things about The Midnight Library. I liked Matt Haig’s writing so I listened to this book soon after finishing Life Impossible. 

Summary in 4 Sentences: A young woman (about 35) has a series of things go wrong in her life, realizes she is stuck because of a lifetime of bad decisions, has nothing to look forward to, and decides to end it all by OD’ing on anti-depressants.  When she passes out, she finds herself in a different dimension – a Midnight Library that exists in the moment between life and death, full of books of all the lives she could have lived, had she made different decisions.   In the Midnight Library, she is guided by her HS librarian who’d been very kind to her when she was going through hard times when she had been in High School, and she gets to experience many different directions her life could have taken had she made different decisons.  She comes to realize that even those fantasy lives are not all peaches and cream, finally realizing that the life she actually had, had a lot to offer  – and in a final dramatic scene, she gets a second chance. 

My Impressions:  I did enjoy listening to this book, though not as much as I did The Life Impossible.    The premise and setting, were cleverly done, and I thought the lessons our protagonist learned were valuable and useful for anyone.   But as I note below, this book would appeal more to someone younger and at a different stage in their life than I.  

I guess my challenge with the book was that I had trouble relating to Nora – the young woman protagonist of the book.  She seemed almost a caricature of a fearful, somewhat helpless and hapless young woman, intelligent and capable,  but without any self confidence.  Her family life had not been good growing up – her parents’ love for her was conditional, they didn’t get along and she felt on her own.  She did not have much understanding of the rough and tumble real world, where shit happens, people get knocked down, the strong get back up, while the weak stay down, feel sorry for themselves and/or get into alcohol or drugs.    She seemed to feel almost powerless to step up and take action – when things got tough, she folded, took the easy way out.   Sometimes I felt like the book was therapy for women who feel powerless to take responsibility for their own lives.  

   I recognize that Nora may represent a significant percentage of young women (and men) who’ve been dealt a tough hand and have essentially given up when things start going badly. And such women (or men) would be able to relate to Nora and get more out of this book than I did.  The setting and the theme of the book were clever and interesting, and several of the alternate lives that Nora stepped into were interesting and provided her (and us the readers)  with insightful lessons and useful perspectives.  But I did get tired of the melodrama, and with each alternate life, hanging out in her head with the drama, anxiety, excuses and unwillingness to accept some of the realities of life and her fate.

A couple of other things that frustrated me in this book.  

  1. Each time Nora stepped into a new setting as a “Nora” who’d made different decisions and therefore was on a different life trajectory, she had to spend her first hours/days figuring out who were these people around her and how did the Nora in this alternate life get here.  The Nora who was transported to this alternate life through the “midnight library”, and the Nora IN that alternate life were actually two different people,  because Nora would have evolved very differently on the path to this alternate life than she did in her “root” life.  They simply looked and sounded alike and had had the same childhood.  Having to go through that awkward transition period again and again in each alternate life was tedious for me the reader.  Couldn’t Matt Haig have let the two identities overlap a bit, so that Nora  could actually experience the new life without having to figure out who she was supposed to be, and how did this alternate Nora get into this alternate life? 
  2. In each of these alternate lives (except one,)  Nora was challenged and ultimately gave up – quit, and chose to go back to the Midnight Library. While experiencing the alternate life, she had not invested the years of work and sacrifice, ups and downs that are always on the path to becoming  a success –  that super athlete, or that rock star, or that professor.  She simply and suddenly found herself in that fantasy role, and when the going got tough, rather than embracing the challenge,  she bailed – back to the Midnight Library to try another life.   Isn’t that sort of how she got to that tough place in real her life to begin with – by bailing when things got tough and overwhelming?

All that said, a couple of other unusual things I DID like about the book.

  1. Matt Haig, through Nora explores the idea that what she was experiencing was not simply a dream but reflected a possible “reality” of an infinite number of alternate, parallel universes that quantum theory postulates.  We are briefly introduced to quantum theory, Schrodinger’s Cat, and the possibility that we exist simultaneously in multiple lives on multiple (infinite) planes.  Cleverly, the music story where Nora had worked, and from which she was let go, was called “String Theory.” 
  2. Nora had been a student of philosophy, and through her, Matt Haig introduces the reader to a number of great books in the canon of humanistic philosophy – books that were on Nora’s book shelf and that she had read. She also referred in the book to quotes from Sartre, Camus and others that resonated with me – a fellow humanities geek.  I would have enjoyed chatting with Nora about these thinkers and challenging her to incorporate their ideas into her life. 

For an older adult – I’d probably give this book a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 with kudos for the clever idea, the writing, and the themes.     But I would make it a must read book for young women (or men) in their late teens or twenties, struggling with an identity crisis, unfavorably comparing their modest unfulfilled lives to those the media has inflated into always happy icons (who strangely enough, often commit suicide.)  This is an excellent book for those not happy with where they are in their lives, and are trying to figure out how they got there,  what to do about it, and how to move forward. 

At 72 yrs old, that’s not me….

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

On Desperate Ground – the Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle, by Hampton Sides

Posted on October 27, 2024 by schoultz

Why this book:  Selected by my SEAL book club at my recommendation, after hearing so much good about it.  I read rather than listened to this book – and having the print copy has the advantage of photos.  This is also the 5th book by Hampton Sides that I’ve read – and each has been memorable and impressive.

Summary in 3 Sentences:The book begins with some background on what led to the Korean War, a brief look at the Inchon landing and other early successes and mistakes the US made at the beginning of the war fighting the North Koreans,  that led to the US invasion of the North and ultimately the Chinese entry into the war. The bulk of the book is about how the 1st Marine Division was assigned the mission of getting to the Yalu river to complete the conquest of North Korea, but enroute, were surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir by Chinese forces, and through amazing, courage, initiative, and lots of killing and suffering on both sides, the Marines were able to escape almost certain annihilation.  The book describes the battle through the eyes and experiences of a number of participants at every level of the battle, to includes some of the Chinese perspective.  

My Impressions: What an amazing story of suffering and courage.  And so well told.  After reading this, one can only say “God Bless the United States Marine Corps” for their courage and resilience under the most horrific of conditions.  Sides gives us the perspectives and personal stories of a wide variety of players in this drama – heroes as well as villains.  Villains were not only the Chinese but also American Generals MacArthur and Almond who underestimated the threat of Chinese involvement, and cavalierly and without serious consideration of risks and contingencies, sent the Marines into what ended up being a hell-hole.  

Sides interviewed dozens of veterans of the Korean war and included the personal stories of a number of them.  He also did not forget the Korean people and included the experiences and perspectives of a Korean family. These personal stories amplified the depth and drama of the almost hopeless situation that the Marines were put into by the poor decisions of Generals  Almond and MacArthur. 

The marines were cut off from support and resupply, separated into groups that were unable to reinforce each other and were attacked and surrounded by a huge force of the Chines army  that had not been detected earlier.  Thirty thousand Marinces and other UN forces were in serious danger of being annihilated by a Chinese force four to five times their size, but were able to slip out of the noose that was tightening around them by the amazing courage, initiative and resilience of the troops and their leaders.

In addition to the Chinese, the marines had to deal with extremely cold weather – regularly regreat battle and exceptional courage by  chapter in American history. 

The leading hero in this story was Marine Maj General Oliver Smith, whose calm and deliberate leadership resulted in the Marines being able to escape almost certain destruction.  The leading villain was Army Lt General Edward Almond, Smith’s superior who refused to acknowledge the risks that Smith brought to his attention, as General Almond would accept no challenge to his plan and uncompromising goal of marching a division though mountainous, inaccessible terrain to get to the Yalu River.  Right behind Almond on Sides’ list of villains was Gen MacArthur who directed the campaign from Tokyo and who would show up in Korea for brief photo ops, and then abruptly return to Japan.

At the conclusion of the book, Sides provides an epilogue to tell us what happened to the many characters we got to know in the drama of the battle and narrow escape from the Chosin Reservoir.  In his acknowledgments, he provides an impressive list of people, meetings, and other resources that shaped his story and experiences writing this book.  He also recommends a good list of books for further reading on this epic battle.   

Hampton Sides is a fabulous narrative story teller and writer of popular history.  This book deserves its place along with the other four books of his I’ve read (Blood and Thunder, Kingdom of Ice, Ghost Soldiers, and The Wide, Wide Sea) as inspiring history, bringing little known stories of our past to life.  He is so well known and widely read, he has done our country a service in writing this book and putting a spotlight on this great battle and exceptional courage and performance by Americans in war.  This battle, like the Korean War is often overlooked by Americans – but never by Marines! 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment